


Afterlife

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Again, Angst, But this world's not it, Canon-Typical Violence, Classic Mode Game Mechanics, Complicated Relationships, M/M, Might've gone Forsyth/Python/Lukas in a happier world, Post-Game, Spoilers for the Jugdral Games, Yep I went there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-04 09:37:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11552454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: Something got lost between the Deliverance of Zofia and the Brotherhood of the One Kingdom. Turns out the line between war and peace, or life and death, isn't as clear as it's supposed to be. Of course, Python kind of knew that anyway.





	1. Two Ends of Time

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Many thanks to the explosion of lovely Forsyth/Python and Deliverance Trio fanarts & other fanfics that helped fuel this idea.
> 
> 2) I intend to exploit the interconnected nature of the first five FE games (and their remakes and far-future sequels) until the cows come home.
> 
> 3) This is the fanfic that "Somebody's Darling" was spun out of.

Another day, another dungeon. 

Buttercup balks as Python tries to spur her through a misty corridor that might’ve been constructed from blocks of ice for how cold and blue and shiny it is. Her ears go back and she snorts at him, and as Python watches the puffs of steam curling up from her muzzle he can't shake the feeling that this is stupid and it would’ve been better to leave the horse outside and navigate this maze on his own two feet.

He stays put, following the haloes of flame around Gray and Saber and the balls of light carried by Silque and Genny, all the while clutching the longbow he's dubbed _Witch Killer_.

This dungeon doesn’t have a lot in it, which is fine by him. Python shoots down a spectral Saint, who lets a decent-looking steel bow clatter to the floor as she disappears into the ether. He doesn’t even bother collecting it. They’ve been lured down here by treasure, and a steel bow doesn’t count for much in the arsenal they’ve already got in the convoy.

They spend a couple of hours wandering around before Alm notices everyone’s getting tired. He gives the call to retreat, and Python falls into line beside Forsyth as they proceed back up to the surface. Even Forsyth, clutching the Rhomphaia that used to belong to Lukas, doesn’t have much spring in his step right now.

“Cold enough for you?” 

Forsyth just shakes his head; the clouds of breath around them both make it hard to see his face. The old temple has one final surprise for them, though— a trio of brigands right by the entrance who’d likely followed them in with hopes of mugging a well-equipped party.

Buttercup turns out to be useful now; she glides across the floor as Python easily outpaces the infantry and _Witch Killer_ unleashes a bolt that takes down the most menacing of the brigands. When all three are down, the others courtesy of Lady Clair and Dame Mathilda, Python dismounts and scoots across the slippery tiles to see if “his” brigand has anything good on him. Sure enough, there’s one of those glittery shards that Alm’s been collecting. 

“Got one.”

Once they’re out in the sunlight again, Python turns the shard over in his hand and holds it up to the light to see the pattern of stars.

“Scorpio.”

He can feel the grin spread across his face even as Forsyth claps him on the shoulder with a celebratory shout. The final piece out of the twelve, the reason they’ve been hurling themselves again and again into the Sanctum, and it’s in his hand. Python doesn’t even bother going back into the temple to see what the old hermit there is going to make out of the twelve pieces they’ve assembled. He doesn’t care about the treasure, which’ll belong to Alm— _King_ Alm— by right. He’s only glad they don’t have to go back in that stupid ice temple ever again after today.

-x-

Python and Forsyth have their own celebration after the good boys and girls of the Deliverance have gone to sleep.

“Come on, treat me like you would Clive.”

It's not actually a request for Forsyth to treat Python's body with reverence or sprinkle him with flower petals and gold or whatever the hell else Forsyth would actually do if he had the senior knight in his bedchamber. It works as a goad, spurring Forsyth to get noisier, get him angrier, get him shoving Python into the cot until Python thinks the crappy rough sheets are sure to leave a burn on his face. He’s also pretty sure Clive would not get this treatment from Forsyth but that isn’t the point.

The point is getting off quick and passing out, because as tired as they already are Forsyth will keep going all damn night if Python doesn’t find a way of wearing him down. Python’s sure he blacks out that night with a self-satisfied smile on his face, one that disappears the moment he wakes and realizes where they are, where they’re going, and what’s coming next.

-x-

Back at Zofia Castle, Python shuts himself away in what he calls a workshop whenever he’s not actually needed for something. As one of the core members of the old Deliverance he’s been granted a little space to himself at the barracks, and everyone in today’s amalgamated Deliverance knows that “Python’s Nest” is for napping because Forsyth’s already spread that allegation far and wide.

This particular day he emerges in the late afternoon and makes sure to perform a full yawn and stretch in the doorway. Valbar gives him a friendly nod, but then again the man doesn’t have a malicious bone in his sizable body. Out of the people who’ve come over from Queen Celica’s army, Valbar’s done the best of fitting in, and as all right as he seems Python doesn't know what to make yet of the archer he brought along with him. Leon’s hovering at Valbar’s shoulder and he pretends to look shocked at Python’s appearance.

“That beauty sleep doesn’t seem to be helping you, Python.”

“Get back to me in ten years, Leon. We’ll have a contest.”  

Leon gives him some arch and precious look that’s supposed the cue for Python to escalate a battle of wits but today the thought of who'll be what in ten years sends Python into a sour mood and he stalks past Leon and Valbar without another glance in their direction. He knows where he’s got to be now; any trip to Zofia Castle inevitably takes him past the room where Lukas is slowly dying. Every time Python walks down that hall he tells himself he’s not going to cross that threshold today, not again, and every time his feet propel him into the sickroom anyway.

“Hey, Luke.”

“Python. I thought I recognized your step in the hallway.”

It’s a plush enough room to be trapped in for the rest of your life. Windows like sheets of fine crystal overlook the palace gardens and the velvet curtains on the bed are the same shade as the armor Lukas used to wear before a blast of black magic left him face-down on the floor in Nuibaba’s mansion. The massive bed and the rest of the furniture are of a quality fit for a lord; Python has an eye for these details, after all. It’s just as well that Alm hasn't sent Lukas back to his family to rest after Their Majesties declared victory over the gods and the Deliverance became full-time dungeon divers, as the brother who'd forced Lukas off to war in the first place probably would've just smothered him and then laid claim to his pension, but by now anyone with any sense has to know that his convalescence there at the castle is a joke and Lukas will never be on his feet again. 

Lukas sure has known it from the moment he regained consciousness on the cold stones in the witch’s lair. 

"I do believe she, as you once said, punched my ticket," he'd whispered to Python, who'd responded with a curt, "Yeah, we're not talking about that right now" but never has been able to forget that exchange or the weird little smile Lukas gave him in that moment.

Lukas is showing off his normal smile now, the one that charms everyone within a fifty-yard radius, just like nothing could be better than a visit from a comrade even though it takes half a bed’s worth of pillows to prop him upright. When Python holds out a packet of butter cookies in his direction Lukas does manage to snatch the cookies out of Python's hand with enough force that the edges of his nails rake across Python's palm.

"Easy there." Python settles down in the chair alongside the bed— not leaning in attentively the way Forsyth does, but with enough room to stretch out his legs on this nice, friendly, casual visit. 

Sugar might bait him into a fleeting burst of energy but Lukas is paler and less substantial than he was the last Python saw him; Python glances around to find something to focus on that’s not the inexcusable waste of a splendid body. He spies a book half-buried in the folds of the brocade coverlet.

" _Romances of the Holy War_ ," says Python. "Sounds terrible. I can get you something better to pass the time."

 "Dame Palla lent that to me. She said it was quite the popular read in Archanea."

“Nice of her.” Python flips through the gilt-edged pages of the romance, which which at least has some bright pictures to break up the chunks of text. "Looks like a pack of lords and ladies making kissy-face and having babies."

"You might be surprised. I thought you liked the sordid tales kept hidden under the façade of chivalry." And Lukas shows that strange smile now, the one that’s touched by something Python can’t put a name to. "I've been enjoying it but some days it feels as though the pages are too heavy to lift."

"Them's the breaks.” Python sets the book down again on the bed; he laces his fingers behind his head and deliberately tips his chair backward a little. "You finally get some quiet time by yourself to read, and there's not actually any sand left in the hourglass."

He looks Lukas square in the face as he says it; the weird smile doesn’t falter, but one never can tell with Lukas. Maybe Python’s crossed a line.

"You're the first to acknowledge that openly,” says Lukas. “Thank you."

“Yeah, see.. I've got to be the one to counter Forsyth's endless well of denial. He still thinks you'll be walking out of here.”

“That’s… Forsyth.”

Python doesn't know the gamut of opinions that Lukas holds about him or Forsyth or anyone else and expects he never will, but every now and again there's a shading to some judiciously chosen word and Lukas tips his hand to let on that he's got someone's full measure in ways they don't know themselves and wouldn't want to know.

“Yeah. That’s so Forsyth.”

Python suspects he doesn't really want to see himself through Lukas's eyes any more than he wants a full takedown of his companion.

Forsyth himself arrives just then with his usual brilliant timing, hauling a basket overflowing with treats and a stack of additional things for Lukas to read. Python refuses to surrender his chair; he cleans his nails with a penknife as he watches the other two talk and throws in a word every now and again in the old, familiar three-way round of catch.

It takes way too much effort to keep his face rigid when Forsyth blurts out little comments about the things Lukas is going to do and see and join them all in when he’s better. His innocence hurts. Python catches Lukas's eye and isn’t surprised by the expression he gets in return.

That smile hurts in its own way and Python suspects he’ll be deeply sorry when it’s gone.

-x-

"Forget the horse," Python says to himself. 

Something in him just _knows_ better. This isn’t a scene for a cavalry charge. Weird fissures in the floor, walls and columns all over the place, and they’ve already heard at least one rockslide coming from the other room. Buttercup isn’t going to do him a lot of good in down here.

“Got yer back,” he says as he leaps down to join Forsyth and slaps Buttercup on the rear to let her know she can scram.

“You mean I have yours,” Forsyth says, but the look on his face is of straight-up relief at seeing Python dismounted. It’s just like old times as they creep toward the next room of this ancient tomb together, Python unleashing arrows from behind Forsyth’s armored bulk and then advancing the next step in his wake, with Forsyth’s lance always between him and the next horror awaiting them.

And these are horrors. Ancient warriors, dressed up for eternity in scarlet cloaks and gilded armor, with the white eyes and noseless faces of any other Terror. The fancy-dress Terrors keep coming at them, and Forsyth and Python end up teetering at the edge of a crevasse alongside Dame Mathilda and Sir Clive as the awakened dead mill around on the other side of the gap. More Terrors keep surfacing from the dark corners of this room like they’re sprouting out of the floor, and even after Genny joins them with her healing and magical tricks Python gets the sense this expedition is just going to grind them down until these “lords of the tomb” have a dozen new friends.

And to make it all even more pointless, they’ve found nothing at all— no gold, no relics, not even a lousy bag of silver marks.

“We’ve been had.” Python’s voice echoes off the crumbling columns. “There ain’t shit in this dungeon.”

“We have to send these heroes back to their rest,” Mathilda is saying, but the scream of a horse cuts her off. 

Python sends a few final arrows into the dark as they retreat, first back to the antechamber of the tomb and then into the other half of the tombs, where some of their raiding party managed to get cut off by one of the fissures in the floor.

Gray, Tobin, and Lady Clair got a little stupid today, and they’ve paid for it. Clive and Mathilda both descend on Clair in a brotherly-sisterly dog’s pile of hugs. Gray is sitting on the tomb floor wailing, but what catches Python’s attention is Tobin’s bay charger. The horse is down, both forelegs snapped by the blow of one of these high-faluting Terrors and there on the stones is Tobin sprawled out with a halo of blood around his shattered skull.

"Well, that's what happens to little Bow Knights who take their horsies somewhere horsies don't belong," Python says under his breath.

Meanwhile Gray is still bawling, and Lady Clair’s gotten away from her family in an attempt to comfort Gray, and in the middle of it all stands King Alm looking stunned by how fast the day's gone wrong. Meanwhile more Terrors are moaning at them from the other side of the crack in the floor.

Silque breaks through the confusion with her clear, calm voice.

“Sire, the turnwheel.”

“Oh. Right,” says the king, and if anyone’s forgotten that Alm isn’t even of an age to drink they’ll remember it now from the sight of his young and panicked face as he rummages through his things in search of the little set of gears.

The wheel turns back time even though the goddess who blessed it is dead. Everything flickers and slows and distorts and when time goes back to normal for Python, and he and Forsyth are charging into the room they’d cleared before they heard Tobin shriek. When Alm sounds the call to retreat about two seconds later, Forsyth puts down his lance— Lukas’s lance— his face a grimace of disappointment.

“But we’ve only just started,” he says, and for once Python has absolutely nothing in his figurative quiver to lob back in response.

-x-

He’s tangled up with Forsyth in the privacy of their tent but Python’s heart— or more accurately, his cock— isn’t in the right mood tonight.

“You are _preoccupied_.” Forsyth sounds more surprised than offended. “What’s going on in there?”

“I’m thinking about Tobin.”

“Don’t you bring him into things.” Now Forsyth’s offended; he hasn’t forgotten a salacious (and admittedly _half_ -serious) comment Python made about the cutest and most aggrieved of the Ram Village boys many a month before, and the grip he has on Python’s shoulder is anything but tender right now.

“Gods, no. Not like that. You remember the part where he bit the dust this afternoon and Alm used the turnwheel to undo it?”

Forsyth doesn’t remember. After many minutes of badgering he admits that something like that possibly happened, but to him Tobin’s death is like a half-forgotten dream. Python can still hear the scream and see the slick of blood on the stones and he lies awake long after Forsyth is snoring, reliving each moment as the gears spun backward and time itself branched off in a new direction.

Was he not supposed to remember something that technically no longer happened? If he polled everyone else in the party, would they all have the selective amnesia that’s struck Forsyth? Python, being Python, is not going to hound everyone else for their memories of the afternoon… but still it does keep him from enjoying the night.

-x-

"This hasn't been one of my better days," Lukas says as Python shows up, packet of cookies in hand.

"You don't have to apologize for the things you can’t control."

Besides, he can see with his own two eyes that Lukas is having a bad day. He’s starting to sink into the mound of pillows that hold him up in a way Python remembers from back when his own grandparents died and there’s a new sharpness to his face that doesn’t look right somehow. The red hair that once stood out like a beacon on the battlefield now makes a sickly contrast with skin turned parchment-pale by so many weeks abed, and Lukas can’t muster that much interest in the cookies, either. Python has to help him open the packet and even then Lukas only eats half of one. Python stares at the fading scars on Lukas’s forearms, remembering how effortlessly Lukas held him and Forsyth apart that time the two of them came to blows in camp. Python can feel it now like his own skin has a memory-- a force so gentle it didn't actually hurt but still came on as inexorable as a landslide. Lukas with no strength left in his arms is some kind of bad joke, like Python would be without his eyes.

That’s where he’s headed, though, as the magic corrupts his blood and degrades his bones. Lukas doesn’t have the stamina to read Palla’s book on his bad days and so Python's been reading aloud the tale of some noble from long ago and far away having misadventures in about six different countries. A couple of the characters strike Python as vaguely familiar, like a haughty blonde princess stuck on her knightly fool of a brother and a mercenary who gives off the airs that he’ll screw anything that moved.

"So where we left off, Miss Princess who is totally _not_ like the noble lady Clair was slumming with some guy who in no way, shape, or form resembles that Jesse guy who's tagging along with Queen Celica…"

Python’s putting his own gloss on the text with the half-assed justification that he needs to speed things up if Lukas is even going to get to the middle of the book before he trades his bed for a coffin. Thanks to these edits they’re able to get through an entire chapter in one afternoon. They leave off with the hero's best friend getting executed and the hero and his merry band of characters fleeing for some place where it snows all the time.

"And on that cheerful note..." Python snaps the book shut and places it on the side table where Lukas can reach for it on a better day. “Hey, ah… before I leave, do you want anything?”

He’s not asking to ferry Lukas more cookies or anything so innocent.

“Hmm?”

“You know.” If Lukas didn’t get the hint Python _had_ intended to act it out, but the dungheap of this situation is too much for even Python to overcome right now and he keeps his hands jammed in his pockets. “Anything.”

“Ah. I wish I knew what to ask for. Thank you,” Lukas says, and it’s more of an apology than a refusal.

“Yeah. Well, if you change your mind…”

And all Lukas can give him is that same strange smile.

Python thinks he now gets what gives the smile its haunting allure. Death itself might be the thrill that’s eluded Lukas all of his life…and if it turns out to be the final disappointment, there’ll be no reporting back and no way for any of them to know until it’s too late for them. 

He locks himself in his workshop the rest of the night, only coming out when Forsyth spends a solid fifteen minutes pounding at the door. King Alm wants them all to assemble for a grand announcement, and Python had better be there, at least half-awake and half-sober.

He’s fully awake and cold sober, as it happens, but by the time Alm is done talking Python wishes he was neither.

-x-

“You have got to be kidding me." He's speaking to the back of Forsyth's head as they return to their quarters. "A merchant wants an escort back to Archanea and that warrants some kind of royal expedition with the King and Queen on board? I’m starting to think Duma and Mila aren’t the only beings out of their damned minds.”

“It’s not just on account of the merchant," says Forsyth, but it's telling the way he keeps walking with his shoulders rigid instead of turning around to argue his case. "This way Dame Palla and her sisters will be able to join their people as heroes…”

“Yeah, fine. The pretty ladies and their pretty ponies deserve a hometown parade.”

“And the kingdom won’t be left unattended, as you heard His Majesty say General Mycen and Lord Conrad will be able to maintain the peace until we get back.”

“For the love of… Forsyth, would you just listen to yourself sometime?”

Forsyth marches ahead for several paces after Python stops short in the courtyard, but when he realizes he isn't being followed, he finally turns around.

"There may be more to this than a simple escort mission. Sir Clive did refer to a rumor of a labyrinth grander than any temple of Valentia that's certain to hold artifacts of vast power..."

“What do we need more power for?" The space between him and Forsyth feels a hell of a lot more vast than the distance of a few yards as Python stares his friend down. "The gods are dead. Are we trying to become gods now?”

Forsyth shakes his head and makes to walk away. Python calls out to his friend's retreating back.

“Answer me!”

Forsyth doesn’t turn again. Python doesn’t give chase. And Lukas isn’t standing there to bridge the chasm between them this time.

-x-

"Right. So we left off with Our Hero and his remaining friends marching south through the desert looking for some serious payback against the evil Prime Minister who's engineered this whole conspiracy that's taken out Our Hero's closest friends and most of his family..."

Python’s skipping over a lot of the story now as Lukas goes down in a spiral that can only end one way. The old scars on his wasted arms are covered by fresh bruises that spring up from nowhere and there’s a hint of crusted blood at his nose, like whoever cleaned him up that morning was afraid to scrub too hard. Still, he’s watching Python with keen attention as Python blitzes through the chapter. All the romances of the title are winding down in a mess of lovers' spats and tearful goodbyes and a vast pile of burning sand, ending in a battle with the evil Prime Minister that wraps up far too easily.

“And then the pretty lady general who betrayed the Prime Minister tells Our Hero that all these accusations of treason hanging over his head and such are just a big misunderstanding and he needs to come to the capital and have a chat with the king to clear everything up. And since we’ve established a long time ago that Our Hero ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed, he goes along with it.”

“Ah.” 

“Yeah, I think you’ve guessed where this is going. Hey, thanks for finding us all a hero with a _little_ more sense in his head than this guy, Luke.” Python reaches over to give Lukas the most careful hair-tousle he’s ever bestowed in his life.

“That feels nice,” Lukas interjects, and Python keeps it up for a few minutes more before continuing with the tale.

It fails to meet Python’s decidedly low expectations for a happy ending in the most spectacular fashion he’s ever seen.

“And then Our Hero and all his friends die in a fire. No shit.” Python stares at the blank page that separates Act I from Act II and then holds the book up to Lukas as proof he didn't half-ass this particular twist. "No really, that's how this thing ends."

“I believe this is why the saga is so famous,” says Lukas, who almost looks pleased at the terrible fate of the characters he's been following for the past few months. “No one wants to believe that their heroes don’t always triumph, and yet…”

“Sometimes the shit rains down and everyone dies. Or fire rains down, whatever. And true love didn’t save anybody. Our Hero, his cute little sister, the handsome idiot she was married to, the little dancing girl, the mouthy kid who kept stealing shit, the drippy archer guy who wanted to make with the priestess, the guy who wasn't Jesse…”

“Indeed.” Lukas closes his eyes. “Python?”

“Yeah?” 

“Is it only human nature to be… torn always in two?”

“Eh?” The first thing that springs to mind is Forsyth trying to juggle his moon-eyed adoration for Clive with everything he’s ever shared with Python.

“Rigel and Zofia, Valentia and Archanea, both the…both…”

“Both what? I can’t follow you, buddy.” Lukas makes a sigh in response. “Luke?”

Nothing. Python studies the shadows on his face while he confirms that Lukas has fallen asleep, and only once he knows Lukas is oblivious does Python slide back his chair. Forsyth finds him at the tavern six hours later, drunk enough that a game of darts ended early when he pricked his own finger.

"You look as crap as I feel," says Python, because Forsyth is an unholy mess right now— drawn face and puffy eyes and a curtain of stringy hair wet from the rain.

"I stopped to pay a visit to Lukas,” Forsyth says as he rakes back his hair with one hand. “It was atrocious."

"Soul of tact, aren’t you?” Python says into his tankard.

“Just the difference between a few days ago and now…” Forsyth takes the stool next to Python, but instead of sitting upright he’s a mass of hunched shoulders dripping rainwater onto the floor. Python watches the drip-drip-drip through a haze and knows he’s seeing a man whose wellspring of denial has finally run dry. Forsyth's son-of-a-scholar vocabulary isn’t even up to the job of expressing his horror. “He just looks so _small_.”

“Compared to you, he kinda is.”

“Would you _stop_?” All Forsyth’s nerves are exposed and twitching right now. "He did _nothing_ to merit an end like this."

"Neither did the kids who starved to death in the famine besides that they were born here and the gods went crazy."

Forsyth responds with a long, loud, shuddering breath, almost like the moan he makes in full rut except every single thing about this context is wrong.

“Drinks are on me tonight,” says Python.

“I don’t think it wise. I shouldn't have even come.”

“Yeah? There’s not enough ale in this tavern to make either of us feel better but hell, give it a try.”

They stagger out of the tavern sometime past two in the morning. The rain is pissing down and Forsyth puts his foot wrong and goes down in a mighty splash. As Forsyth emits a string of curses from the gutter, Python starts to laugh, not because he wants to but because something inside of him is slipping and once he’s going there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop. He throws his head back as his knees go wobbly and the rain beats down on his eyelids and into his open mouth until the laughter subsides enough to speak.

“Gods, Forsyth. What the _hell_ are they doing to us now?”

**To Be Continued**


	2. Someone Else's Mistake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the tragedy that's been playing out for months finally resolves, Python follows Forsyth to what might be the tenth level of hell itself.

Lukas dies without a word of complaint, or any other words for that matter because speech deserts him five days before the breath leaves his body. It might’ve made a better story if the end came while Sir Clive and Dame Mathilda doted on him, or with the king and his blessed queen praying over him, but as with so many who take their time a-dying the right people aren’t in the room and it’s just Python and Forsyth to see Lukas off as the last grains slide through the hourglass. They link their arms to support Lukas, lifting his head to keep him breathing a few more moments as if easing this last pathetic struggle somehow means anything.

"I'm sorry I made all that food you didn't like. I was kind of a shit about it,” says Python, half apology and half a bid to elicit one final smile out of his comrade. 

It probably wouldn't have killed him to make some extra sweets now and again, unless by some perverse stroke of fate Python's being a hair more considerate to his friend would've caused them to somehow switch places, landing Python where Lukas is now. It has occurred to Python that if the turnwheel can open up a better fork in time where someone ends up less dead it can just as easily open a fork where someone’s more dead than they would’ve been.

Forsyth doesn't say anything at all; he stares at Lukas with wide, stricken eyes, rubbing his thumb into the palm of Lukas's hand in agitated circles like he can somehow keep life sustained by doing it. He keeps trying to coax some response out of that hand long after Lukas's strange little smile blurs into the slackness of death.

"You can stop that now," Python says at last, but before the words are out of his mouth Forsyth jerks away to stumble around the room, eyes streaming and shoulders heaving, and then he begins to shout-- calling for a priestess, calling for a herald to send for Sir Clive, for King Alm, for someone, anyone.

Python stays in place, holding up Lukas as best he can because there’s really no point in doing anything else and he may as well hang onto Lukas for the last time in this life. Some warmth lingers in the curve of Lukas's shoulder and a familiar scent still clings to his hair.

“I guess nobody really loved you enough," he says, knowing Forsyth in his frenzy won't hear the cold truth anymore than Lukas now can. "Maybe we didn't deserve you.”

He’s never believed in love less than he does right now and maybe never wanted to believe in it more. He hits some wall when he tries, like a bird flying into the palace windows, and so Python lets Forsyth believe for him, spilling out a great heart-bleed of wounded love with every motion.

For all the good it does anyone.

-x-

"We commend your servant Lukas to your embrace in the peace of the earth..."

Props to Queen Celica for bringing in that ancient sage to do the honors, Python thinks as he watches dry-eyed from his place in the honor guard. No expense is spared on this funeral just as Their Majesties spared nothing to keep Lukas comfortable at the end, giving him everything in the world except time.

Forsyth isn’t doing as good of a job at keeping the appearance of a stoic soldier.

“For fuck’s sake, Forsyth.”

“Can you not hold your vile tongue even now?” comes the snot-strangled reply.

It gets Forsyth to turn down the waterworks.

Once the king and queen have paid their final respects, the members of the Deliverance file by the coffin. Python puts in a monumental effort not to grimace as Sir Clive ruins a decent enough speech by giving Lukas one final message to convey to that idiot Fernand, then does his best not to listen to a single word of Forsyth’s choked-up babbling to the departed. And then it’s Python's own turn.

"Don't stick around here trying to watch over us, okay? Just... move on. Better luck next time. You still owe me at least one night on the town, but I reckon I’ll catch up with you eventually.” 

Python slaps the lustrous surface of the coffin with enough élan that he can hear a sharp breath of indignation in the line behind him. Undaunted by sideline critics Python resumes his position in the honor guard for the burial. As they lower the ropes he wants dearly to make the jest that they’re all letting Lukas down one last time but not enough that he’s willing to risk Forsyth kicking him into the open grave.

He does get close enough to the edge to catch a look at the weak Pegastym sun glinting off fine-grained wood and the bronzed links of the chains that double-wrap the box.

“It wasn’t enough. I tried, but... sorry.”

Python tosses in his handful of dust and walks away. His legs keep moving until he’s past the boneyard, past the castle gates, outside staring down at the sweep of green land before the city as his head goes back to the day they lost the castle to Desaix. At some point Forsyth joins him, and they watch the clouds chasing each other over the landscape.

“She’s still worth dying for,” Forsyth says. “Zofia.”

Python could point out that this isn’t Zofia now, it’s the One Kingdom. He could point out a lot of things right now but it’d be a waste of breath and so they stand there. Eventually Forsyth puts his arm over Python’s shoulder. A little after that Python lets his head rest against Forsyth’s arm. The clouds keep chasing one another.

-x-

The funeral banquet is hell. Too many somebodies falling over themselves to praise the herald of the Deliverance, the very first man to accept King Alm's leadership. Compliments flow for Lukas and his good nature, his competence, his fine mind and sterling character.

Python wants to offer his own tribute. "I remember watching him body-slam a Rigelian archer. Made me hope he'd plow me like that after curfew some time," is what he’d like to add, but for once some spark of what Lukas called decorum holds him back… or maybe he’s just feeling weary that evening.

He sits alone, and after a time everyone else leaves him be. He can hear Lady Clair telling one of the castle’s ancient retainers that she’d spent the night personally sewing a wreath from the last of the season’s roses just to adorn Lukas and how she’d filled the coffin with flower petals. Which may be true, but she’s talking like it’s some grand achievement that ought to earn her a medal. He manages to block out Lady Clair's prattle by focusing on Sir Clive's earnest conversation with Forsyth. They're off to the side by the table of sweets and it's just far enough away that Python can't hear enough to satisfy his curiosity and so he creeps over there under the pretense of taking a slice of the three-tiered cake that looks like leftovers from the royal wedding. The explosion of cream and fondant and candied fruit is every bit as disgusting as Python expects, but getting it lets Python hear Sir Clive giving Forsyth tidbits about what direction the Deliverance will take after this jaunt to Archanea wraps up. A few sentences are enough for Python to realize Clive is dangling in front of Forsyth the sugarplum of being his right-hand man.

At least Clive has the decency to wait until Lukas is in the ground to start grooming Forsyth as his second, Python thinks as he forces down another forkful of the cake made to celebrate Lukas's union with the dirt. 

-x-

Someone’s stupid enough to actually say a voyage across the sea ought to help everyone forget about the new grave amid the rows of tombstones at Castle Zofia. Python doesn’t have to lift a finger to handle Boey because Forsyth, still stinging from the grief of picking over Lukas’s possessions, does it for him. It makes the trip overseas awkward, as the little sage and his friends Mae and Genny keep staring at Python and Forsyth and sometimes even Clive like they’re once-loyal dogs gone rabid, no longer to be trusted.

The sea voyage doesn’t help anyone forget, really, but it is filled with distractions, like how they’re supposed to feed the new beast Tobin’s taken to replace his horse. The oliphant is such a nuisance that Python decides he wants nothing to do with such long before they reach the western shores of Archanea.

-x-

“Here’s another tablet!”

It stands like a grave marker amid the fallen columns of this mess of a place. Python keeps watch from atop Buttercup as Forsyth uses the remnants of his fine education to decipher the ancient text.

_“The second was the creation of a singular, perfect being.”_

“Sounds like a swell guy. All he wants to do is make an army of the risen dead and then create a perfect being.” Python doesn't really give a fuck about the tale of the alchemist Forneus as relayed on the tablets but he’s decided that tracking them down and reading them is the main thing keeping Forsyth sane in this shithole. Just beyond the tablet is their path to the next level of the labyrinth; Python stares into the darkness of the broken floor.

“How in hell am I supposed to get down there?” The drop down to the fourth sub-basement looks even worse than the previous three. “Damned horse.”

Somehow he and Buttercup survive the leap. Python has no idea how Tobin and his oliphant will navigate the drop and right now he doesn’t care. Forsyth is on the trail of the mystery of the demon alchemist, and anything else is secondary to making sure Forsyth survives this place.

 _“Thus the Council chose to seal Forneus’ workshop with him inside it…”_ Forsyth reads off another tablet.

“Well, we’re getting to the bottom of why this place is cursed,” says Python.

Not long after this they blunder into a Fire Dragon guarded by a squadron of specters. Python realizes as he fires _Witch Killer_ that his heart rate isn’t even up and he wonders if that’s a good sign or a bad one. Once they’ve gotten past that mess of a skirmish, he and Forsyth crouch behind some of the enormous fallen columns to snack on dried meat and drain half their supply of water. They might as well be underwater; it’s freezing down here and the light is the green of a scum-encrusted pond.

“So far, so good,” says Forsyth once they’ve gotten their break in. “We can indeed get to the bottom of this!”

Then they stumble into the demon alchemist’s army of the risen dead. When that skirmish is done, Saber— arguably the most competent fighter from Queen Celica’s half of the army— is dead on the floor and King Alm has to burn another use of the turnwheel. Python realizes that this means that he and whoever else are cursed with remembering the abandoned timeline are going to have to tangle with the army of the dead _again_.

It doesn’t go much better the second time.

“Undead kids in creepy masks with rusted weapons are kicking our asses,” he shouts to Forsyth as they huddle in a small gap between a broken column and its base. “Maybe it’s too early to say but I’m gonna wager Their Blessed Majesties made a mistake this time.

“Python?" Forsyth sounds almost timid right now.

"Yeah?"

“In the slim but not impossible chance we don’t survive this, I—”

“Hang in there. We’re not dead yet and we’re both getting out of here alive. I don’t care what we’ve gotta do to make that happen.” Breaking Forsyth would be hard proof of the sheer evil of this labyrinth.“Come on, we can’t stay here too long. I don’t want to be ambushed by some little dead girls in cute dresses.”

The next chamber has a half-way decent surprise.

“Well, at least this place has some treasure…”

A nice bow it is, too. Python can’t carry both it and _Witch Killer_ and so he throws it in their supply cache. He’s forcing himself to believe that the supply caches matter, that they’ll all be proceeding out of the labyrinth at their leisure with their arms filled with goodies, and Forsyth’s going to have the full story of the demon alchemist and his army committed to memory for posterity’s sake. By the time they meet up with some more dragons Python stops pretending. It gets colder and darker and they’re running with several different species of Terror growling and moaning and crashing along behind them and none of this can possibly end well.

“I think the tablets beneath the seal are all the handiwork of Forneus himself,” Forsyth says at one point.

“Okay. I’m still wondering why the hell we breached the seal that was supposed to keep something inside.”

They burst into another room full of dragons, and this time it’s Gray who ends up spread out on the stones with half his chest scooped out by talons while Tobin shrieks in disbelief from the back of his oliphant. Alm reaches for the turnwheel and Python looks on as the magic gears spin away. One of the gears pops off and goes pinging into the darkness.

They put the dragons to bed the second time without suffering casualties and go down to the tenth level of what actually might be hell.

-x-

“It can’t possibly be blood, Python. It wouldn’t be red after all these years.” 

Forsyth sounds almost cheerful now, a clear sign he's reached the end of his tether and is slipping into mania. Python doesn’t believe him anyway— if dead children are running around this place swinging rusted weapons after gods-know-how-many centuries, the scarlet patterns on the floor can definitely be blood. Blood of what, he doesn’t know or care.

Python doesn’t see which of them, reeling from fatigue, stumbles into the cantor hiding out by the altar. All Python thinks is that the mistake lets them all get a load of what the cantor is slinging.

"That's the Medusa spell. What the fuck is that even doing here?”

There’s no mistaking the skull shooting lights from its empty eyes and a halo of snakes. It’s Nuibaba’s signature curse, and Python knows exactly what that thing does— with the first hit you’re half-dead at best, the second hit you’re a goner. Alm’s not taking chances that whoever it was that tripped over the cantor is still breathing, because before the eerie light of the spell even fades Python can feel the lurch in his gut of time flowing backward and suddenly he and Forsyth are discussing the blood on the floor again.

He knows it really happened because there are delicate bits of metal all over the floor along with the bloody patterns. The turnwheel's broken and the next of them to fall will stay down in this pit forever.

“If we charge the cantor…” Forsyth is saying.

"Nuh-uh. Forsyth, stay the hell away from that thing.”

He’s not even thinking as he drives Buttercup toward the cantor, faster than Forsyth can stride in his metal shell. Witch Killer does what it’s meant to do and the Medusa problem gets solved before anyone else dies and before the cantor can start summoning Terrors. As for the other thing down there…

The tablets called it The Creation. It looks to be part bird, part insect, part reptile… and Forsyth already told him the blood of a divine dragon went into making it. Python never wants to see another dragon as long as he lives. He’s cold, he’s tired, his blood feels so sluggish he’s likely not in much better shape than the army of the dead, and this is probably the last time he’ll succeed in preventing Forsyth from doing something stupid in the name of blind heroism.

His first shot makes the thing mad, but it swoops around in spirals, never coming close enough to strike him. Feeling nothing, he fires upon it again and again. A ball of violet light in a vortex of darkness comes his way but it sputters and dies in front of him. The thing’s getting tired, getting sloppy, thrashing in mid-air rather than swooping. From the corner of his eye Python sees the shimmer of divine light that’s lit up room after room of this and every other dungeon.

King Alm brings down Falchion and when the act is done there’s no more blood on the floor, no more taint of evil in the air, just a big empty tower in an ocean of sand and the tale of a madman etched into conveniently placed stones. Python jumps down from Buttercup so that he and Forsyth can hold one another; Forsyth’s shaking in his armor and when Python looks down he can see the fragments of the turnwheel gleaming in the new light.

-x-

The labyrinth adventure is the end of the road for what remains of the Deliverance. Palla and her sisters stay in Archanea while Jesse and Kamui jump ship along the eastern coast. Some of Queen Celica's entourage sail back to their priory, some of King Alm's village buddies head on back to Ram Village, and those of them who claim to be professionals are left standing around Zofia Castle sizing one another up. Forsyth's spending all his own time in the reflected radiance of Sir Clive and Lukas stays where he is, having missed all the fun. Python isn’t interested in the cockfighting going down among the wannabe knights and Lukas doesn’t make for very good company anymore so Python spends half his time carousing in town with the bonus Alm gave him for his part in slaying The Creation and the other half in his workshop. Now and again Python picks up the book he kept as they divvied up Lukas's personal effects, but without the goal of entertaining Lukas there's nothing in it for him and he gives up partway through the first chapter of Act II. Most days he actually just sleeps there, his big project having wrapped up before they left for Archanea. 

Then the day that was going to come finally comes and Forsyth’s banging on the door of Python’s workshop with another round of terrible good news. Clive’s decided to unveil his master plan. As he speaks of the new place awaiting them both in the Brotherhood of Knights, Forsyth’s eyes are shining in a way they haven’t since the early days of the Deliverance, when everything he’d ever dreamed of seemed almost in reach and nobody guessed they’d have to gallivant off to Rigel and kill a god to achieve it. He looks ten years younger than his age. There’s poetry in his voice. There’s light in his eyes, joy in his smile, and he extends a hand now to Python that, if clasped, will lead Python into the rapture of his fantasy world.

Python's hand remains balled in a fist at his side.

"I don't want it.”

“What?”

“Nothing doing. No knighthood for Python here.” As Forsyth blinks at him, Python adds the thing he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to point out.  “It’ll never be the same, Forsyth.”

“You have never fully given your trust to Sir Clive!” Forsyth sounds like he's taking it personally.

“Yeah, and that’s not about to change.” He's always figured that on the day he and Forsyth have this particular falling-out he'll point to Clive's four villas and the rest of the bricks that form the insurmountable wall of privilege between them, but even as Python opens his mouth he realizes they've gotten so far beyond the issue of villas and titles and the mere trappings of privilege that he hardly cares about that anymore. “I don’t really know if I trust anyone above me these days.”

Those long sea voyages have given Python plenty of time to think over how the One Kingdom is already looking a hell of a lot like the old kingdoms, just with different knights and different jumped-up nobles taking the place of the ones they’d joined forces to kill, but rather than argue that one out with Forsyth, Python goes for the gut.

"How come Alm didn't use his magical wheel when Lukas hit the dirt?”

“What?”

“He could’ve kept Lukas alive the way he brought back his little pal from Ram and half the damn army now, but he didn’t and nobody even thought about it. Nobody asked.” Since Forsyth is staring in gap-mouthed disbelief, Python adds, "Everybody figured 'eh, that looks bad, but he can take it.' Because it was Lukas, and he was the one person everyone thought we'd never have to worry about. We got stupid.”

"How can you chastise us like that, like it’s somehow our fault?” Forsyth is tripping over the words of his denial. “Nobody asked for the turnwheel to be used on Lukas because he wasn't killed. He regained his senses, he kept marching with us, he-- Python, he spoke of working the earth with his own hands after the war if that’s what it took to survive."

"He took four long, miserable months to die after what that witch did to him.” He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to cover these bare, bald facts. “Really now. What did you think was going to happen? Did you think it was a loan when he handed you his lance? Didn't that tell you something?”

"I-I had faith in his abilities…”

Forsyth trails off and the pause stretches on for a minute or so, then another minute, and then Forsyth makes that choking sound that used to be damnably effective in changing Python’s course.

"You got there. You're a knight, or will be in a couple of days. You'll be seated at the right hand of Sir Clive henceforth and that's a place where I don't want to be.”

Forsyth tries to collect himself, tries to put on the mask of the rational, dispassionate man that he wants to be so badly because Sir Clive needs someone like that at his side, speaks using his indoor voice instead of his battlefield one.

“I knew his death would affect you more than you’d dare to admit, but you mustn’t let it come between us, Python.”

Forsyth has a long way to go before he can pull off what Lukas did naturally, and seeing the attempt doesn’t help matters any.

“Nah. You’ve got it wrong. I’d have told you where to stick Clive’s offer anyway and Lukas being gone doesn't change anything. This just makes it a little easier on me to tell you no.”

“Why?”

“I’m choosing my path before someone else’s stupid mistake chooses one for me.” He puts on one of his old careless poses as he says it, arm behind his head, rising up on one toe, and maybe that’s the magic trick that finally punches through every layer of denial and rationalization and gets Forsyth to understand.

“This can’t be goodbye.”

“Hell no.” Python lowers his arm and makes a swing at the air for old times’ sake. “You’re always welcome wherever I’m at. I’ve just got no intention of staying here is all.”

"When are you striking out on your own?"

"No hour like the present. An accomplished denizen of catacombs like me can make his way well enough in the dark."

"That's not enough time.” Forsyth knows he isn't bluffing because he's not scoffing at the meager ground Python'll cover tonight before crawling up into a tree to sleep. Forsyth's bleeding out as surely as if Python had picked up the Rhomphaia and gored him with it.

"All right. I'll stay for your coming-out party, but that's mostly because I don't want your big day spoiled by people asking where Python's disappeared to."

He's braced himself for a punch in the jaw, but when Forsyth springs toward him it's to wrap Python in the most suffocating embrace they’ve shared since Python agreed to join the army with him.

_“You."_

Python hears everything packed into that one word, exasperation and affection and frustration and grief and all the interlaced feelings of a lifetime spent in each others’ pockets. 

"Just don't start whaling on me in your eternal disappointment again,” Python says as he tips his head back and leans into Forsyth’s embrace. "There's no one left to tear us apart."

-x-

Forsyth makes one of those three-in-the-morning attempts to change Python’s mind, which almost never works but has just enough of a track record that Forsyth keeps trying.

“I’ve been thinking on what you said about the turn wheel and you must agree that His Majesty didn't use it for any selfish purpose during the war. Surely with the griefs His Majesty suffered, had he intended to use it to unwind time he’d have done so for Lord Berkut or the emperor-- or Fernand. And that he did not says that the cost of our victory over Duma is not something the king takes lightly. But an accident in some temple while searching for treasure… that’s a different equation altogether.”

"The sad fact that reviving a weasel like Fernand would cross anyone's mind before helping Lukas is part of the problem here,” Python replies. "Besides, you just admitted these dungeon expeditions put everyone's lives at risk to no end that anyone can justify. None of that was worth our lives, so why were we there?"

“You won’t yield.”

“I can’t. And you know better than anyone else in the world the difference between ‘won’t’ and ‘can’t’ when it’s coming from me.”

-x-

The big day comes, and there in the throne room of Zofia Castle, on the carpet with ankle-deep pile beneath gilded chandeliers, stands Forsyth in line with Gray and Tobin and Valbar and Leon at his back. The senior knights like Clive and Zeke and even Clair— anyone who’d sworn real vows to the previous generation of monarchs— go first, and Forsyth is the first of the new blood to step up to the dais.

Python watches from the throng packed into the hall; he’s not the only member of the army playing bystander and his eyes meet Saber’s eye and patch across the carpet. Saber came home with his queen from Archanea but Python gets the sense the man’s not going to stay. It doesn’t exactly satisfy him to know this, but it makes him feel a little more settled about everything. 

As King Alm taps the blade of Falchion on Forsyth's shoulders and Queen Celica strings a medal around his neck, Python feels a knot form his in throat. His friend Forsyth of their no-account village goes down on one knee but it’s Sir Forsyth of the One Kingdom who stands up to take his place among the worthies.

"Saw you cross the finish line," Python says aloud. "I'm done here."

**To Be Continued**


	3. Echoes on the Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Python tries to live on his own terms out in the hinterland, but it's not easy for a war hero to evade the drama of the war. Forsyth trying to pull him back in is one thing, but old faces and new rivals and one lingering ghost shape his life whether he wants it or not.

He leaves Buttercup behind in the stables of Zofia Castle with a “Free Horse” sign tacked to the stall. Horses, after all, are for knights, part of the package that sets the Sir Clives and Fernands of the world apart from the Pythons. Where Python is headed he doesn’t need any fancy horse.

The spot he’s picked on the map is about halfway in between the village where he and Forsyth grew up and the estates where Lukas’s swine of a brother is living the fine life of a lord. It’s of no interest to anyone in high places, effectively outside the reach of the king's law and his newborn order of knights. That makes it the ideal location to found what Python calls the Rangers.

At first he tries at making the militia a league of equals, a real brotherhood with no ranks, no chain of command, no fancy uniforms, no decisions made except by consensus of everyone at the table. All comers are welcome, nobody gets to lord it over anyone on account of their birth, and Python tries to have everyone work naturally to their own strengths— the ones with an artistic bent making their maps and charts, the shadier characters as spies and scouts, and so on.

It’s a complete flop. It’s hell to get ten or eleven people to agree on anything, even how to build a fire, but mostly his new comrades don’t want to make their own choices. They'd rather follow the orders of someone who's looked into the eye of a mad god and lived to shrug about it. Within six months, Python has to admit to himself that it’s his militia, that he’s the leader of his own little army as surely as Sir Clive and then Alm led the Deliverance. He starts making executive decisions and issuing orders. The others follow him, and after that there’s no turning the Rangers into anything else.

-x-

“Now, before we blaze in there looking to apprehend everybody, I’ve got a thing or three to say about prophecy,” Python says to his latest green recruits as they brace themselves to take on a den of brigands. “Not the kind about mystical heroes sent by the gods, but the self-fulfilling prophecy that involves saying things like ‘the odds are impossible,’ ‘we won’t make it out of here alive,’ and ‘at least we’ll die with honor.’ And I want every one of you to forget that shit before you leave this room. Anyone who goes into a fight without a healthy sense of self-preservation isn’t making it out of there, and the stakes of rooting out brigands here in no man’s land aren’t worth the risk.”

He’s never wanted to be the man standing up making an inspirational speech and really never thought he could do it, but a year on the frontier has stripped Python of the flourishes that let him not be taken seriously. These recruits— the youngest of them only sixteen— know their lives depend on how well they listen.

“And let’s talk about luck, specifically fool’s luck. I’ll grant you that somewhere out there is that one in a million person for whom the stars align to keep them alive despite every damn fool thing they did that ought to kill them, but that’s not me and it’s not any of you. And if you ever do come across someone like that, steer clear because it’s not going to rub off on you. What’s going to happen is the shot meant for them hits you, and that’s it for you.”

He scans the room, hoping to see comprehension in seven sets of eyes. Maybe five and a half of them get it, he thinks.

“No fool’s luck. No death before dishonor. You want to march to that drum, the capital’s that way. Are we clear?”

Mumbles of “yessir” and “yeah, chief” greet his ears.

“All right. Let’s move out.”

The raid turns out to be a cakewalk. Local brigands are nothing compared to the might of Rigel or the parade of Terrors inside of that accursed labyrinth overseas. Still, it’s not defeating petty criminals that earns him the trust of the villagers, but the time Python takes down a man-eating wolf that’s menaced one town every Wyrmstym for three years now. A barrage from _Witch Killer_ ends the wolf problem and after that everybody loves Python and his Rangers. When the love gets doled out as hot meals and free ale, Python’s a happy man. A content one, anyway. 

Python’s pretty sure he’s not going to die in an open fight with the local low-lifes. It's the knife through his back in a tavern that's going to get him, or a blade across his throat while he sleeps. He's passed up on the chance to die a hero. Forsyth offers it to him again every time he drops by, and Python always refuses.

Forsyth comes often enough he has to be heading Python’s way each time he’s given a furlough, and he always arrives with a bottle to share and some measure of gossip from back at the castle. None of it’s very interesting gossip— it doesn’t surprise Python that Lady Clair has deigned to marry Gray or that Saber serves the One Kingdom as a hired sword instead of a knight. He’s more amused to learn that Leon has taken charge of Buttercup after his own horse went lame and is making better use of her than Python ever did. All in all, the real pleasure is in listening to Forsyth being Forsyth, even if it’s for a couple of days out of every year. When he’s around Forsyth, Python starts slipping back into his own skin, becoming again what he was before he had to actually lead kids into the jaws of death.

One day, Forsyth isn’t going to come anymore, and rumors of the tragic fate of Sir Clive’s loyal lieutenant will come trickling in. He knows this as surely as he knows his own ignoble end in a tavern or alleyway. Sometimes, as he watches Forsyth marching back in the direction of the capital, Python can sense the two invisible paths awaiting them, each as stark as the outcome of a coin toss. Heads, the knife gets him first. Tails, he’s left hanging when Forsyth doesn’t arrive. He’s not even sure which one is the worse end.

He’s also starting to think that end’s coming sooner rather than later, because a surprising number of Zofians turn out to be not that thrilled about the One Kingdom and its Rigel-bred king.

One chilly evening at the tail-end of Pegastym, Python’s sitting by the campfire, wondering how long it’ll take for Lukas’s fence-sitting opportunist of a brother to get involved in something shady and thereby hand Python the excuse to murder him. It’s not a dream, really, not a fantasy of how satisfying it’d be to send half-a-dozen arrows into the throat of some bastard he’s never met, but it’s a nice little thought exercise based on the likelihood of human greed and duplicity. On the other side of the fire one of the newer recruits, Nyko, is proclaiming what a shame it is that their heroic king is plagued by so many rebels.

“Comes with the territory. You’re the guy on the throne, other people are going to line up to take it. That’s why being king isn’t worth the trouble if you ask me.”

“Isn’t just saying that treason, chief?” Nyko asks.

“Treason?” Python doesn’t bother to stifle a derisive snort at Nyko’s logic. “You’ve got a lot to learn about big, loaded words, kid.”

He’s seen treason and regicide and rebellion. Was it only four years ago? King Lima IV and Desaix already feel as far away from today as the characters in that book he used to read to Lukas, the one that’s been sitting untouched among his possessions ever since he refused the call of the Brotherhood.

-x-

"You reading, chief?"

Cade wears his shiny brown hair in a slant across his brow and looks enough like Tobin that Python's nearly called him by the wrong name more than once. His friend Nyko sports an unruly crop of dark curls and seeing them makes Python wonder if he's just going to keep seeing the same faces on different bodies the rest of his time above the dirt. Or maybe it's that old saw about the same eyes in different faces coming true. He’s not sure yet. 

"Yeah. Some ancient tale about a kingdom that's divided down the middle. One half is a green paradise where everyone's living on easy street and the other's a hellhole where the peasants farm rocks and life is cheap and there's a big to-do about the hero that's going to bring them together."

"So, it's Valentian history?"

Cade can’t read the fading gilt letters that spell out _Romances of the Holy War_ on the front of the book. He doesn't know how to read anything more than his own name and Python's heard him complain a few times that there ought to be more teachers out here in the frontier to help kids like him get a leg up. Cade’s probably right but as long as King Alm is busy fending off that many rebels, he’s not going to furnishing frontier teachers.

"No. It's not."

It is and it isn’t— warmed-over melodrama from centuries ago and yet way too much like everything Python knows and has lived through. Old eyes in new faces, he thinks, thumbing through the pages, and something about it isn’t funny anymore. In the fork of time they’re not standing in, the one where Lukas didn’t take a bolt of magic square in the back, Python would never have learned these things. Lukas would’ve read the book and sent it back home with Dame Palla and Python would never be the wiser and would be happier for it.

“ _Is it human nature to be forever torn in two?”_

Python remembers this as he reads of the liberation forces, the supposed good guys in this mess, tipping the delicate balance of power and crossing from the green land of plenty into the bleak land of hardship, hell-bent on dethroning its king and seizing its capital. Maybe Lukas was onto something, and there's some immutable truth in the division of the world from Duma and Mila right down to every Nyko and Cade. Maybe he shouldn't put much stock into the last flicker of a sputtering candle. Python doesn't know, and sometimes there's less comfort in knowing what he doesn't know than there used to be.

-x-

It’s been three years since the death of the gods, then five years. Time passes in fits and starts and sometimes Python notices the angle of the sun in the sky and wonders where the hell the time’s actually gone. He’s become a name in the region now, having somehow garnered enough renown that idiots come to cause trouble just to show him up, or for the honor of meeting their own end thanks to his bow. He’s put enough effort into the Rangers that the idea of shutting them down and relocating himself to someplace else like Rigel or the coastal wastelands pisses him off, but the idiots may drive him to it yet.

Notoriety also means that old acquaintances beyond Forsyth find it easy to track him down.

"Lady here to see you, Chief," says Cade, with a moonstruck awe in his voice that lets Python knows he means a _lady_. Python hopes the comer is a rich potential patron with an easy job on offer. Instead it's the little saint out of Celica's group, pink and fluffy as a piece of spun-sugar candy in the middle of the earth-spattered Rangers. To Python's surprise Genny is perfectly at ease among the rough sort he's gathered around him.

"Did you make all this lovely furniture?" She's spread her rosy skirts and made herself a perch on his desk.

"Mostly."

He's made something useful out of several ancient trees that gave up in recent years, anyway. Genny's little feet swing in the air and Python hears the ornaments sewn to the bell of her skirt jingle. This is the second-strangest thing to ever happen in his office but at least Genny isn't looking at him anymore like she expects him to bite her. She’s here, she says, to take down his story.

“I’ve been interviewing all the soldiers from the Deliverance,” she says, and for however many years it's been her voice is still that of a little girl. “I already talked to everyone who came with Queen Celica but I didn’t get to talk enough to most of the Deliverance during the war. I haven’t been able to find everyone yet, but I especially wanted to find you because you can tell me more about one of the people I’ll never get to interview.”

Python wonders who else from the war has shuffled on to the other side but he doesn’t ask and doesn’t really want to know. Alm’s still on his throne and Genny already mentioned that she’s interviewed Forsyth and the rest of it holds no interest for him.

“Python, can you tell me about Lukas?”

"No." The response passes from his brain to his tongue without Python even giving it a thought. “Haven’t Forsyth and Clive and the rest already told you enough?”

"But you were his friend. You might have something more to share with me..." She inclines her head, looking ridiculously precious with the quill her in hand set just so against her fancy curls. "Maybe something different to tell me."

“Nah.” He tries to let his body language tell her how much he doesn't care about her project, using all the old affectations that he can't get away with in front of his Rangers, but it doesn't put her off. She remains on his desk with a little writing journal bound in tooled leather in one hand, waiting for that quill to get a-scratching. "So what's the point of scribbling down all this anyway? You writing some pious chronicle of the saint-king and holy queen for your priory?"

"Oh no. I don't live there anymore," she says, confirming what Python's guessed from the ring on her left hand.

"You do it for fun?"

"It's my calling," she replies, so devout in her reply that it almost gets a snicker out of Python— Genny’s traded one faith for another. “And they say the best story you can write is the one you know in your own heart. Since this and all of you are what I know..."

"Yeah, but why?"

"Stories make us all feel alive," she says, like she's telling him crops need rain and necrodragons hate Seraphim magic.

"Not me, sister. It's all just dust and moonshine to old Python."  
.  
She answers him with a tolerant smile, and Python isn't sure if Genny is just holding back on calling him a nasty man because he has something she wants or if she finds him absurd enough to be amusing. When he doesn't smile back she begins explaining it to him in her bird-chirp of a voice.

"The stories we tell can keep going forever after we're gone, like echoes on the wind, reaching the ears of people in places we never even heard about in our own lives. It's how our hopes and fears and dreams go on and on. It's how the people we love can live forever."

Genny believes every word of this, as surely as Silque ever believed in Mother Mila or Forsyth believes in the heaven-sent perfection of Sir Clive. She's almost funny, this slip of a girl who walks unafraid through the world because phantom armies obey the command of her staff. Maybe if Python ever felt that kind of power between his fingers he'd have this same sense of wonder, but what he has felt is the flames of a bonewalker singing his shirt and the juice of a Mogall’s eye splashing his face as he pulls out an arrow and there's no deeper truth to what she says that resonates in his soul.

"You want a testimonial on the power of stories, there's a couple of things I can tell you about the gallant Sir Forsyth," he offers.

"That's a start." The quill is poised to strike.

"Just a start? Sir Forsyth's rise from the mud to the top ranks of the Brotherhood won't be enough for future generations?" The gleam in Genny's eyes is predatory now, as the dainty songbird on his table reveals herself as a hungry kestrel, and Python doesn't have it in him to even feel disappointed. "No. You didn't come here for the motherlode on Forsyth."

A simple little story about a common boy made good isn't enough for a legend. He already knows what she wants-- the high drama of heartstrings played and tears wrung out of the very stones, whirlwind love and wrenching death. Genny should've had enough of that already, from the murdered children of Zofia's royal house to the horror of witches giving up their souls. All the names that leave a bad taste in Python’s mouth should’ve been plenty of fodder— Lima, Desaix, Slayde, Nuibaba, Jedah, Berkut…

And Fernand. That'll be a fine pile of straw for any storyteller to spin into gold. Python can already see the scene painted up like the illustrations in _Romances of the Holy War_ , Fernand dying in Clive's arms as Clair hovers in the background demanding that he get better on her pleasure. What it won't show, Python knows, is Lukas standing by on the sidelines observing the noble siblings in their grief, a dead man yet on his feet coming to the cold realization that no one is ever going to tear their hair like that on his account because that's not the role he was made for.

Well, Forsyth tore his hair over Lukas, maybe. A little. But they've already established that Forsyth doesn't count for much in the scheme of Genny's scribbles, new myths for the era after the gods.

It's almost strange how everything just manages to confirm what Python already feels about the uneven playing field of the world.

“I know Lukas was special to you. Forsyth already told me you made his coffin with your own hands.”

“Then damn Forsyth for giving up my close-held secrets,” says Python, though there’s no actual venom behind the words. The specter of generations unborn sobbing over Fernand has been enough to change his mind… just enough. “You want to hear about Lukas, fine. Let’s start with the epic tale of the fiasco at the Southern Outpost."

Genny's big brown eyes glow at the word "fiasco" and she touches the tip of her tongue to the nib of her quill before setting it to paper.

"So the trouble started when Lukas punched some blueblood asshole in the face…"

He tells her the truth, unvarnished and often ugly, knowing damn well that Genny's going to bend his words to her own fanciful aims. Even as he speaks Python can sense from the questions she asks about Lukas that she's not interested in dirty tactics and even less interested in mistakes. Maybe Python is compromising himself by even talking to her but at least he's doing his part to make sure they're all going to remember Fernand as the piece of utter shit who wanted to rip out the tongue of Zofia’s perfect martyr.

-x-

Not long after Genny goes on her way with a satchel filled with Python's memories comes the day Python’s expected for months, the one where Nyko doesn't show up at roll call.

"He left to join the Brotherhood, chief," Cade spits out after a visible struggle with his conscience.

"Okay," Python says, physically shrugging it off.

“I’m sorry. I tried to talk him out of it, but—“

“Don’t think twice about it. I helped take down a god so everyone could live how they wanted to live," he says. "Chase your dreams. It's more fun chasing them if you have a friend at your side."

Cade vanishes the following night. He leaves a note by way of apology, a smiling face accompanied by the four crude letters of his name.

"Good luck," Python says to no one in particular as he files the note away in his desk.

-x-

Five years on the frontier turn to seven and a familiar figure in muted green armor is coming down the path on a day where the clouds drizzle down in a fine mist that beads up on the oft-mended fabric of Python’s favorite shirt.

"If it isn't Sir To Be Reckoned With.”

“Nobody calls me that anymore,” Forsyth replies, and he’s using an indoor voice outside for some reason. As they size one another up Python thinks he’s never seen Forsyth look quite this… serene.

His embrace feels like it should, though, ending with a thump between the shoulder blades that comes this close to hurting. 

"Ram Village wine, huh?” says Python at the familiar shape of the bottle Forsyth produces as his obligatory present.

It’s a joke between them old enough to have gotten musty— Python never has been a wine man, especially not for the cloying sweetness of Ram wine, and Forsyth knows it.

“Brandywine made out of Ram Village grapes,” Forsyth says with a grin.

“I’ll take it.”

They settle in the way they always do, using Python's office as their own space for the night, making of it a present-day realization of the old jokes about "Python's nest." Python takes out the good glasses from the cabinet, the ones that Sir Clive and his lady sent as a late "retirement gift" by way of Forsyth years before. Forsyth uncorks the bottle, they toast the dead and the living, and then they begin to fill in the pieces of each other's recent past one fragment at a time. Tonight Forsyth lets slip the phrase "Lord Tobin" and on seeing the arch of Python's eyebrow he makes a little noise between a muffled cough and a stifled giggle that must surely be beneath his knightly dignity.

"Lord Tobin, huh?” And Python can’t even shake his head over it. "I figured it was going to happen. Signs pointed that way. Does he still ride that ridiculous beast?”

Forsyth turns out to have an embarrassment of stories about Sir Lord Tobin and his oliphant. He regales Python with several of them until, mid-tale, Forsyth’s slightly hazy eye lands upon the worn red velvet cover of one particular book in the case behind Python's shoulder.

"That book was a gift from Dame Palla to Lukas. I looked long and hard for it so I could send it back to Palla and was most chagrined to admit it’d been lost. I never would've imagined you'd be the one to pilfer a _book_."

"Surprise." He's almost charmed to hear that familiar righteous indignation back in Forsyth's voice. "The first part was alright. The second half was a real drag, all these royal brats teaming up to get their kingdoms back, like things obviously weren't going to slide in the shitter again as soon as everyone thought it was over. But for a while there it was a pretty good yarn.”

“If it disappoints you so, then give it back so that I may return it to its true owner.”

“Finders keepers. You already told Palla it walked off.” Python thinks he’d better hide the book tonight so that Forsyth doesn’t do anything silly. “Besides, it’s not like I have any other memento of Lukas to remind me that he was an actual human being and not this shining example of soldiery that you knights use to recruit people to come die for the crown the way that he did.”

Maybe it's been too long since Forsyth's heard Python's mode of speaking truth to power because these words make him flinch.

“How dare you lay down the accusation that the Brotherhood is exploiting his memory!”

“Because you are. I’ve heard the propaganda in the towns, reaching out to the kids who don’t get on with their parents or get run over by all their brothers and sisters. Forget your folks like Lukas. Find a new home with the Brotherhood like Lukas. Be heroes like Lukas, who is never—”

Python stops, not because the litany of things Lukas won’t ever do again is too painful for _him_ but because he can see in Forsyth’s face the dagger-blow of every word he’s already said. It's like the night he got so out of line over Clive that Forsyth went and decked him-- the spreading flush across Forsyth's cheeks, the crease in his forehead, the flare of his nostrils as Forsyth breathes deeply to steady himself. But his fist doesn't get raised in Python's direction and instead of the expected shout comes a reply so somber and measured it doesn’t sound like Forsyth at all.

“I didn’t come here to fight with you, Python.”

Python blinks.

“Look," he says, hoping it sounds more conciliatory to Forsyth's ears than it does to his own. "Just because my heart doesn’t bleed and cry out doesn’t mean I’m ever going to be okay with what happened."

“Nobody—” Forsyth catches himself and continues in that weird, calm voice that doesn’t really seem to be his. “ _I_ am not at peace with what happened.” 

“Aren’t you? You’ve got a perfect soldier up on your pedestal who's never going to come down from it and disappoint anybody. You'd be doing the same damn thing to Clive if he’d been the one left in the dust."

"Will you ever get over your resentment of Sir Clive?” Forsyth's brittle edges aren’t all sanded down. Now he's right on the verge of shouting again. Good times.

"Will you ever get that lack of adoration on my part isn't the same as resentment? There’s that middle ground between the two that’s called _I don’t care_ and that’s the turf I inhabit.”

“Will you never change?” It’s the subdued and quiet Forsyth now.

“Not on your life.”

At least Forsyth’s disappointed face is the same as it’s always been.

-x-

It's about two in the morning and Python's head is resting in Forsyth's lap when he reaches for the bottle of Ram Brandywine and realizes it's empty.

"Damn. Bring two next time. You have the salary for it."

"I'll be getting a raise soon," said Forsyth, because when he's this drunk he's happy about stupid things like raises and promotions.

“Good for you." 

Python can tell from what’s under his head that Forsyth is a little too out-of-it to escalate anything right now, and Python’s perfectly comfortable where he is, so he lets Forsyth be stupidly happy for a while. Maybe they’re both stupidly happy right now, but as the night passes Python realizes he’s intoxicated enough to want to talk about something he shouldn’t and just sober enough to put the words together, which is never a good combination.

"That damned book that I stole. I’ll tell you what was in the second half of it.”

“Hmm?”

“At the very end you find out that some ‘gods’ from Archanea orchestrated every bad thing that went down, and by gods I mean more accursed _dragons_. Dragons running amok on another continent, dragons doing blood magic and resurrecting the dead. We're talking Mila and Duma only six times over and the gods didn't lose. You know what I took out of that?”

“What?” Forsyth’s bleary eyes don't register everything Python said and Python wonders if Forsyth will remember any of this in the morning. It might be better if he doesn't.

“We’re fucked. Not us specifically, 'cause we'll be dead, but humans. The game’s rigged and the house wins every time and we’re all just going to keep on making the same mistakes again and again and again anyway.”

“I don’t know what to make of any of this, Python," Forsyth ventures after an attempt to think this through. ”As terrible as you make this out to be, you don’t sound… angry.”

“I’m not. I get tired even thinking about it and then I say to myself, ‘Hey, stop this wheel ‘cause I want to get off.’ And then I remember there’s some pretty good ale at the tavern and I lost my last game of darts there to one of the local drunks and I need to show him up and that's how I get through another day.”

“Oh." And Python can tell it’s all passed over Forsyth like a slow-moving river of nothing. “Say, speaking of Lukas…"

"We haven't in hours."

"Mm. I dreamed of him the other night.”

Python senses this isn’t going to be the kind of dream that ends in a warm, wet puddle in the bedsheets and he grunts for Forsyth to continue.

“At first it seemed so terribly real. He showed up at my threshold and just stood there, not speaking a word. When I spoke to him, he gave me the saddest smile imaginable and he looked so forlorn that I reached out to embrace him…"

 _And then you felt his teeth come down on your skull_. Python knows exactly how that dream ends but he doesn’t say it out loud, and so he lets Forsyth sputter out the ending to his own nightmare. How any of them could even pretend to believe in the peaceful embrace of the good earth after that many years of brawling with the walking dead was another thing Python doesn’t begin to understand about his fellow men.

Python sits up and slings an arm around Forsyth as his friend unravels now about Lukas and fate and never-ending war and everything else. He starts inhaling the fumes from the empty bottle of brandywine as Forsyth goes on and on because it’ll take too much effort to get to his own stock of drink and he doesn’t want Forsyth to fall even more apart than he’s already doing.

“When the last Terror is extinguished and the last rebel put to the sword, I can believe fully in… in peace,” says Forsyth, and the peace he means isn’t just the peace of a king secure on his throne but the very peace promised the dead in their graves that both Forsyth and Python have seen proved a lie again and again.

“Good luck with that. In the meantime, you'll go on being a romantic fool forever, and I'll be a callous prick forever, and Lukas will be dead and shining and perfect forever, and all's well under the sun.”

He really hopes Forsyth doesn’t remember a damn thing about this conversation tomorrow. One of them has to keep believing in asinine things or the balance of the world will tip over. The day they turn into the same person is the real day the world will end.

“Mila in her madness gave me the eyes to see what nobody else wants to see, and gave you the heart to feel everything in spite of what’s in front of your eyes. And she gave Lukas the ears and the mind to listen to you and me both and put it all together, and we lost that and there’s no getting it back. So, cheers?”

“Cheers.” 

The glass that Forsyth lifts is empty. Python clinks the spent bottle of brandywine against it. His hand slips, the rim of Sir Clive's gift of fine crystal cracks, and that's one more thing in a very long list of things Python doesn't care enough about to regret.

-x-

Python does dream of Lukas now and again, and while it's got nothing to do with a Terror wearing Clair’s wreath of faded roses, it goes the same way every time. He comes across Lukas standing in some place that might be a cliff or a mountaintop except it isn’t, because there’s nothing to anything. The nothing all around them isn't quite mist and isn't quite light and Python stands there with no ground under his feel, watching Lukas stare up into the unbounded blue of the sky.

"I told you to get moving,” Python says.

"I don't know where to go from here," Lukas replies. The reflection of the sky casts a blue glaze over his vacant eyes. "I must be waiting for something, for some signal."

"There's no signal. No anything. The only way out of here is to move forward, so you'd better jump."

Python doesn’t know how he knows these things with the conviction he offers Lukas, but he does.

"I can’t."

“Sure you can. It’s easy.” 

And Python tries to show him the way out of this void. Sometimes he makes to jump, sometimes he give Lukas a little shove, maybe once he took Lukas by the hand like they’d jump clear together. And nothing. Their feet stay on the ground that isn’t real ground.

“What the hell?” Python will say, and then Lukas sometimes murmurs that he _hears_ something in the seconds before Python wakes up.

-x-

Oftentimes the first thought that strikes Python when he opens his eyes is "Shit, I'm awake," and this is one of those times. He freezes, listening in case there’s some kind of ambush in progress, but all he hears is the familiar sound of Forsyth breathing beside him. Python turns his head on the pillow and lets his eyes resolve the shape of Forsyth in the darkness. Green tendrils of hair falling across his cheekbone sweeten and soften the pale angles of his face. It's the way he looks in Python's memories, and if Python never sees Forsyth in life again after today that's the face he'll carry with him to his end.

“This is as good as it gets, my friend. And it's got nothing to do with 'deserved.'"

If someone sets the world on fire tomorrow, he still got one more night with Forsyth out of it before everything burns, and he can call that a win. Python fumbles toward Forsyth, seeking his warmth the way the lowest of organisms seeks the light, and on finding it, he closes his eyes against the advance of dawn.

**The End.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Python calling his group the "Rangers" is a direct echo of what a different bow user is doing across the sea in Archanea in the exact same timeframe, though Jeorge has more illustrious company than Python's frontier recruits.
> 
> Author!Genny is love and you can decide what you want to decide about her marriage.
> 
> I never did find a suitable way to work in the actual epitaph for Lukas: "The world is darker for his loss" but in a sense the entire 'fic did that. ;P

**Author's Note:**

> Lukas, as one of the characters with Classic Mode plot armor, stays in cutscenes through the game if he "dies" before the final battle. Too bad for him his base classes make him vulnerable long before then. Python's forged bow is called "Witch Killer" 'cause he shot Nuibaba with it after she trashed Lukas. Figured I'd confirm that here since the text doesn't go into detail.


End file.
